from the stupidity-in-action dept

As you may have heard, Beyonce took much of the music world by surprise by launching her new album on iTunes only with no buildup. It was an incredibly successful promotion, garnering a ton of sales, and showing that she recognizes that digital is where the music world is these days. However, in a show of pure spite and jealousy, retailer Target responded by saying that it won't sell her physical CD once it comes out, because they don't want to encourage this sort of "going digital" behavior:

"At Target we focus on offering our guests a wide assortment of physical CDs, and when a new album is available digitally before it is available physically, it impacts demand and sales projections," Target spokesperson Erica Julkowski tells Billboard.

She continues, "While there are many aspects that contribute to our approach and we have appreciated partnering with Beyonce in the past, we are primarily focused on offering CDs that will be available in a physical format at the same time as all other formats. At this time, Target will not be carrying Beyonce's new self-titled album 'Beyonce.'"

This reminds me of the petulant and childish response of movie theaters when filmmakers started trying to release films online at the same time they were in the theaters. Like in that situation, these "brick and mortar" guys are fighting back against the tide, looking out of touch and childish at the same time. I would imagine that the basic reaction to Target's decision is to shrug. It's likely that people care a lot more about Beyonce than they do about Target, and if Target wants to send them elsewhere to get the music they want, those people just won't shop at Target. I'm not sure how Target wins in that situation.

Where this gets even more bizarre is that, generally speaking, CDs and such are low margin, or even loss leaders, for retailers like Target. They don't make their profit there, but rather use the CDs to bring people in to sell them much higher margin goods. Yet, in this case, they won't even get that benefit, all because they think they can prevent the natural tide of the move to digital? Oh, and looking childish and petty in the process. Who at Target thought that was a good idea?

from the and-they-go-viral dept

Sometimes I wonder what sort of qualification you need to be a "publicist." At the very least, you would think that it would help to be familiar with the basics of The Streisand Effect, and making sure that you don't make something worse. Apparently, that's not the case for the publicist that Beyonce hired to try to get "unflattering" images taken of her at the Super Bowl disappeared. It all started with Buzzfeed doing what Buzzfeed does -- pulling together a silly collection of images. In this case, The 33 Fiercest Moments From Beyonce's Halftime Show. That apparently resulted in a quick phone call from someone working as a publicist complaining that some of those photos were "unflattering," which was then followed up by an email... which Buzzfeed chose to post publicly as: The "Unflattering" Photos Beyonce's Publicist Doesn't Want You To See:

If you can't read that, the important part says:

Thanks for taking my call. As discussed, there are some unflattering photos on your current feed that we are respectfully asking you to change. I am certain you will be able to find some better photos.

Now, to their credit, the publicist did not demand that the photos be changed, nor make any kind of legal threat. While that may seem obvious since there would be no legal basis for Beyonce to make such a threat, we've certainly seen others make similar legal threats in the past. So it was a respectful "request." And, you can certainly make the argument that Buzzfeed's response was anything but respectful. But, come on. This is Buzzfeed we're talking about. Pageviews uber alles. So of course they're going to get more attention for it.

Some will argue, of course, that "any publicity is good publicity" and perhaps that was the strategy all along. That's a dubious argument however. Beyonce was getting a ton of great press for her Super Bowl performance. Why sully it with suddenly hunting down "unflattering" images that weren't doing any damage to her reputation in the first place? Asking for those images to be taken down hurts her image a lot more than any of the photos in question.

from the worth-asking dept

As we've discussed in the past, works created by the federal government are automatically in the public domain under section 105 of US copyright law:

Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.

So... that would suggest that musical works created by the federal government should be in the public domain, right? And... according to the Times of London, the performance of the Star Spangled Banner by Beyonce at President Obama's inauguration, was actually pre-recorded by the Marine Corp. Band, and then lip synced by Beyonce. Last we checked, the Marine Corp. Band is a part of the US government, meaning that recordings it creates should be in the public domain.

This is a request under the Freedom of Information Act. I hereby request the following records:

A copy of the backing track used during Beyonce's Inauguration performance, as well as copies of other backing tracks created in preparation for Inauguration events, whether or not they were actually used.

The existence of these documents was disclosed by a spokeswoman for the Marine Corp Band to The Times of London

The performance by Beyonce could still be covered by copyright, since she is not an employee of the government, but that backing track almost certainly should be in the public domain. Of course, it's unclear to me if, even if the track is in the public domain, the federal government has an obligation to hand it over as part of FOIA request, but it seems like it's at least reasonable to ask.

from the infringement-insanity dept

I have to admit that I still have trouble with the idea that choreography is subject to copyright. For the life of me, I can't figure out why that makes any sense. It's come up from time to time, such as when the "inventor" of "The Electric Slide" sought to pull down videos on YouTube. Then there were the heirs of a choreographer planning to go after dancers who don't pay to honor the choreographer's legacy, of course. The latest is a story making the rounds that famed singer Beyonce may be facing a copyright infringement lawsuit for a recent video. You can see the full video below, or just jump to the second video which compares some of her moves to a Belgian dance company, called Rosas, choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.

There's no doubt that it appears that there's a tiny portion of the Beyonce video that is inspired by the Rosas video. Historically, people would have referred to that as an homage, not as infringement, but welcome to the modern world. I'm curious, by the way, how anyone can now claim that this takes anything away from Rosas. It's not as if people will say "gee, I saw Beyonce dance like that, so I won't bother watching Rosas any more." Besides the "moves" in question seem pretty limited.

Also, the second half of the video seems to imply that some rather basic dance moves also belong to Rosas, which, if true, would make an awful lot of music videos infringing.

from the left-hand,-right-hand? dept

It really is incredible how screwed up some things are at the major record labels. The latest, via David Johnson, is that it appears (at least as of this writing) that Beyonce's official YouTube channel is blocked in the US due to a copyright infringement issue. I have no idea about if it's blocked elsewhere, but perhaps readers from other countries can let us know. In case they get this sorted out, here's a screenshot:

We saw this happen a while back when YouTube and Warner Music had a dispute about a deal, but I was pretty sure that YouTube and Sony Music had a deal in place. Either way, there seems to be some sort of confusion going on.

from the copyright-law-madness dept

Last year we wrote about a situation in Russia where the promoters of a Deep Purple concert were fined because they failed to secure a license to let Deep Purple perform Deep Purple music. Seriously. It seems that the same situation is playing out again with a Beyonce concert. The Russian collecting society RAO is suing the company it believes was the promoter of a Beyonce concert for not paying up for the right to perform Beyonce music. Yes, by any standard of common sense this is ridiculous. A collection society is supposed to collect for the sake of helping an artist. But how is it possibly helpful to the artist to force promoters to pay for that artist to sing their own songs. It directly harms an artist by making it more expensive for anyone to actually promote a show -- and by funneling money away from musicians.

But what's more troubling is the fact that the two bikinis really are not the same. Remember, copyright is supposed to be about the specific expression and not the idea. But that doesn't seem to be the case here. The two bikinis are obvious inspired by similar ideas -- or one was inspired by the other -- but the actual expressions of those ideas are quite different:

Finally, even if the bikini is infringing, shouldn't the problem be with whoever made the infringing bikini, not who wore it (or who paid for the video including someone wearing it)?